Information workers typically work with desktop tools involving e-mail messages, documents, spreadsheets, and forms that refer to customer information. Unfortunately, there is a deep divide between customer relationship management (“CRM”) systems used to collect and manage data on customers, and the desktop tools that information workers use to communicate and act on this information. This division is an unnecessary barrier between the documents that talk about business information (for example, e-mails or word processing documents between customers and a company) and the information itself (for example, the customer record or order record in the company's CRM system).
Workers may have to leave their desktop documents frequently to see, explore, and act on the information in a separate CRM system. The need to switch between applications is time-consuming and disruptive. When people must collaborate around information or documents, the inefficiencies may compound as colleagues must explore the same references and discover the related information repeatedly.
Thus, there is a need to incorporate and integrate some of the basic functionality of a CRM system, or at least provide access to the data used by a CRM system, with office production tools such as a word processing application, a messaging and collaboration application, a spreadsheet program, etc.